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The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan once wrote, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” The idea of “tradition” is a central one in the kind of conservatism that I am most drawn to — the kind that moves from Burke through Kirk — but it is a vexed notion. To use Pelikan’s language, one man’s tradition is another man’s traditionalism. Did Russell Kirk’s cultural proposals amount to a vibrant conserving of the best of the past, adapted to the modern world, or did they amount to little more than nostalgia? Was Kirk’s attachment to what he called his “ancestral homeland” in Michigan an admirable model of cultivated tradition, or, in this young country, a kind of faux-aristocratic posing?

Alasdair MacIntyre thinks that Burke himself had succumbed to a rigid traditionalism, adhering mindlessly and unquestioningly to an idealized past — which just goes to show that MacIntyre has not read Burke well, or at all. But MacIntyre rightly demonstrates (primarily in his 1988 book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?) that this moribund traditionalism is one of the twin dangers facing any Burkean conservatism. The other is the maintaining of a merely nominal connection with one’s tradition, using its language perhaps but losing sight of its core principles.

Each of these dangers confronts the conservative impulse when it encounters the new. But if those are the dangers, what are the possibilities? This is where it pays to reflect on the cooking of Frank Stitt, whose restaurant Highlands I described in my first post on this subject. Stitt is an Alabama boy whose encounter with French and particularly Provençal cuisine did not cause him to abandon the food of his childhood in favor of the new and exciting Continental alternative, nor to reject this new world to which he had been exposed and simply “return to his roots.” Instead, he saw this encounter with very different culinary traditions as an opportunity to renew his own tradition of cooking and eating. He saw that there are certain analogies between the country cooking of Provence and the country cooking of Alabama; he came to believe that if a great tradition of cuisine could come out of the one, similar possibilities might lie in store for the other. He discerned in Provençal and French techniques opportunities for taking what his own Southern culture already did and helping it to do those things better. So when I eat fried green tomatoes at Highlands I am simultaneously connected to highly developed Continental ways of cooking and presenting food and to my Alabama childhood.

This is of course just what Rémy does for Anton Ego in Ratatouille. (And I would also suggest that this is what Brad Bird himself does in his movies, but that’s a story for another day.)

I understand this kind of culinary art as profoundly conservative in this sense: you love and respect a particular tradition so much that you eagerly embrace ideas that are alien and new if those ideas help your home tradition to become a better version of itself. And I also take my reflections in this post to be complementary to, yet distinct from, the essay by John Schwenkler that set me on this path of thought. John is concerned with certain practices of food making and consuming that follow from conservative commitments; I am more concerned here with habits of thought. But surely the two are necessary complements to each other.

As I have suggested, these habits of thought require a kind of analogical imagination: you have to be able to see something in the alien and new that echoes or resonates with what you know. Frank Stitt has this kind of imagination; many of my favorite artists do. And anyone who thinks this kind of culture-making worthwhile should try to think analogically as well: what would that kind of thing look like in my work? A difficult but necessary task: as Douglas Hofstadter likes to say, “Analogy is the motor of the car of thought.” And analogical thinking is especially necessary to a healthy conservatism, a healthy sense of tradition.

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Must come from Kant: “examples are the go-cart of judgment.”

Cultural hybridization doesn’t really need cheerleaders— it’s what happens as a matter of course, often with wonderful results. But I’m not sure that a “nouveau-ized” regional cuisine is a “better version of itself.” Is the very best country cooking in Alabama inferior to the fancy frenchified version? I doubt it.

The best cooking, in my view, involves no analogical tinkering. It is the product of decades (if not centuries) of accumulated habits and judgments, an accumulation of which the cook is not himself conscious— indeed, no one possibly be. You know you’ve found a cuisine when the quality of a dish is almost uniformly excellent across a region. You start to tinker when you’ve become alienated from such a tradition. These tinkerings can be assimilated into the cuisine only when they are adopted by the tradition over generations.

Conservatism seems to me to usually involve an alienation from one’s tradition. Properly within the tradition, questions of the tradition’s value don’t arise. I would call any such alienated “commitment” to tradition “traditionalism.”

So when I eat fried green tomatoes at Highlands I am simultaneously connected to highly developed Continental ways of cooking and presenting food and to my Alabama childhood.

How does this compare to the idea of an Arab wearing his traditional dress to his new job in the H.R. Department? Or the post-WWII Japanese business practice of keiretsu? Or Selim III and his efforts to reform Ottoman military practice in the European style, which culminated with Mahmud II and the massacre of the Janissary corps?

To me, what you’re describing here is a mutation, intentional or otherwise, subject to market (selection) pressure — which, of course, is how culturgens evolve.

So when you write of the dangers of encountering the new, I must point out that it depends on whether you’re the entrepreneur or customer. If the former, the danger is economic and, if you’re in one of the wilder parts of the world, physical (see this story about KFC opening in Fallujah, or, to tie in with the above, see how Selim III met his end). If we’re talking about the customer, the danger is that sometimes, after tasting the new, you can never go home again. When enough people buy into the new way, the “traditional” way of, say, making fried green tomatoes, becomes an anachronism, and enjoyed as such (similar in kind to a Renaissance Fair, Civil War reenactment, or, perhaps, a cattle-drive tour).

I’ve read quite a bit of Kirk, as well as Burke. Like many parts of capital-c Conservatism, or, for that matter, romantic Leftism or deontological Liberalism, I think they need a good acid wash of demystification.

Matt, you ask: Is the very best country cooking in Alabama inferior to the fancy frenchified version? I would say that it depends on the context. For everyday food, no. For a special occasion, yes.

You start to tinker when you’ve become alienated from such a tradition.

You don’t think there can be legitimate and valuable innovations in cooking? Your picture strikes me as an untenably idealistic picture of how “organic communities” work. But in any case, there aren’t many such communities anymore, so the problem for most of us will be how we manage the inevitable encounters with the alien and the new. It’s true that “Conservatism . . . usually involve[s] an alienation from one’s tradition” in the sense that conservatism is almost always a response to such alienation, or the threat of it. But sometimes the threat of alienation happens to the best and soundest of traditions, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, so that simply avoiding the alien or the new is impossible. At that point one simply has to think about what the healthiest response to outside influences is, which is what I’m trying to do here.

Kris, you write: So when you write of the dangers of encountering the new, I must point out that it depends on whether you’re the entrepreneur or customer. It’s certainly possible to consider these matters in a business context, but I was just talking about cooking and eating. Also, being just an Alabama redneck I don’t know nothin’ about no Janissaries and keiretsu, so you’re on your own there.

Alan: Also, being just an Alabama redneck I don’t know nothin’ about no Janissaries and keiretsu, so you’re on your own there.

Well, that’s certainly one way to discourage comments.

In turn, I must point out that I’m just a poor ole’ Chattanoogan without a pot to piss in. Given my Cracker Barrel Southern upbringin’, I’ve learned it’s best not to say anything, when you have nothin’ to say.

Kris, I was just saying (in what I thought was obviously a light-hearted way) that I don’t know anything about the historical examples you gave and so can’t compare them to the experience of eating fried green tomatoes. It’s just a joke, nothing to get offended about.

The Highlands phenomenon is not unique. I live in Newark, NJ. On Bloomfield Avenue (the Sopranos street) is a southern Italian restaurant: Michaelangelo’s [sic]. The chef eats everywhere, and translates what he eats into southern Italian cuisine. Marvelous! (I despise the Romantic cultural transition from artisanship to artistry, so I’ve never bothered to learn the chef’s name.)